@blogdiva

I had this toot directly below yours in my timeline and thought first they were from the same thread 😅:
https://todon.eu/@MediaActivist/112056963234712929

@lachlan @Chelleville

Don't know how it is in your area, but e.g. in Spain over 15 % of the total and over 40 % of the newly built apartments (means that their proportion is increasing steeply) are in the hands of "large landlords" that usually can be considered as a "company".
However, I agree with your take that landlordism is (generally) parasitism. And converting individual into landlords is one of the pillars to achieve a permanent shift towards conservative politics, achieving a significant of the population being worried about how to maintain the status quo of exploitation because they have skin in the game.
Private pension funds are another strategy alike.

@MnemosyneSinger

💯
I think it makes toyally sense to use such open anarchism concept.
There's a lot of stuff going on that has anarchist elements, but not the label. People helping out each other, questioning authority, rejecting power and organizing for their interest in non-hierarchical groups.
Additionally :anarchism: narchism is also a very western-bound concept. There are many different ways to live these core values, exemplified by antiauthoritarian movements all over the world and human history.

It's what we do and live, much more than what we claim as our label to be. Sometimes it makes sense to show the banner, as it might make it easier for interested people to know where to look for more info. Or sometimes I identify myself as anarchist in the hope that somebody thinks "ah, such nice people are anarchists?". But as you day, there's no need to put a label on the granny that cooks at the food not bombs if she could feel uncomfortable when her neighbours ask her why she's with the anarchists now...

I have to admit that I happen to find myself trying to spread the word and make people see what wonderful ideas are and were out there (I was today in a very cool exposition about anarchism before and during the spanish civil war and am still impressed how progressive these people were (culture, education, basic income, commons, women's rights). Nearly 100 years ago. And many ideas are still in the collective mind and comvert into actions.

@thekitmalone

I (non-techie) advocate always to use https://switching.software , riseup mail and pad as well as framadate.
But hell, it *is* difficult for the laypeople not to just use a google drive...

@goatsarah

I think the tragedy is that a) Spain built one of the most modern high-speed railway networks and they dismanled almost all other trains in order to be able to show large passenger numbers with the brand new AVE trains. And b) RENFE is a mess. plainly. a hoard of drunken monkeys would manage the trains better.

As night trains are the superior art of traveling, I never understood why in the last decade most train companies dismantled them.
I always suspected a mixture of pseudo-modernism ("high-speed trains are more modern"), lack of cooperation among rail operators of different countries (the European rail system has more of a patchwork than a network) and the conspiracy theory of car and air travel industries lobbying against the most convenient way to travel long distances.

Luckily, follks in Eastern European countries weren't as shortsighted as their counterparts in the other parts of Europe, and maintained their night trains. ÖBB is most active in bringing back night train connections in Europe. Turkyie and Ukraine are good on track, too!

If you want to find night train connections, check this web:

https://back-on-track.eu/night-train-list/?

"Back-on-Track is a European network to support improved European cross-border passenger train traffic and night trains." 🖤

#NightTrains #Trains #Railway #EuropeanMobility #Mobility #Travel #TravelInEurope #FutureOfMobility #EuropeTourism #Tourism #MobilityTransition #SleeperTrains #SNCF #DB #OEBB #ÖBB #NightJet #Nightline #TrenItalia #MÁV #PKP #PolRail #RENFE (just kidding, the Spanish rail company is a candidate for being the worst in Europe )

⬆️

@hakan_geijer :anarchoheart3:

@hakan_geijer

Hey, I did too 😅
(Now I just can't find the toot, I swear...).

I had the impression of Fauda's interview sounding like what a smart Hamad politburo officer would say to obtain support by naive western leftists.
Vague stuff about 'resistance', 'unity' and freedom... no deeper analysis about power structures that shape the conflict anywhere.

Here is an interesting text from 2013 about the relation of western anarchists with movements in colonized countries.
https://anarchiststudies.org/palestinian-anarchists/

@hakan_geijer

*rallying around the closest dramaqueener*

Really powerful.

"Part of what has made the experience of this event feel so different from the status quo—and so different to Palestinians and Jews—comes from the fact that Palestinians were undeniably the actors, for once, not the acted upon. The protagonists of the story. I consider it an enormous failure of our movements that we have not been able to build a vehicle for that kind of reversal in any other way thus far. Our Jewish movements for Palestine were not powerful enough to stop other Jews from gunning down Palestinians in peaceful marches at the Gazan border fence, or to keep Palestinians from being fired, harassed, and sued for speaking the truth about their experience or—God forbid—advocating the nonviolent tactic of boycott. And now, we do not have a shared struggle able to credibly respond to these massacres of Israelis and Palestinians."

@kuantancurls

#SolidarityWithIsrael #WeStandWithIsrael #FreeGaza #FreePalestine #Apartheid #IStandWithIsrael #StopTheViolence

This has been the hardest week we’ve ever had to weather as a staff at Jewish Currents. Events are moving so fast that there seems no hope of apprehending any of it fully, of saying the thing that will feel right for the moment which is already gone. With great effort, we finish a section of our explainer only for new information to surface and invalidate it. And it’s not just about the facts. Feelings and positions are in flux. There are political questions and fault lines that have been simmering under the surface in our organization—in the Jewish left, and I suspect the left generally—exploding to the fore, gumming up the works at a time when urgency feels paramount. Staff members are periodically bursting into tears, fighting with their families or with their friends, running on fitful sleep. A contributor’s son is a hostage. A contributor in Gaza texts: “Still alive. They are bombing everywhere. Nowhere is safe.”

Most of our internal disagreements center on the correct container for our grief. Our staff is not unlike the rest of the Jewish world in that many of us are only a matter of degrees from someone who died or was taken hostage. How can we publicly grieve the death and suffering of Israelis without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians?

We have good reason to worry about this: As Israelis count their dead, politicians in Israel and the US call for Palestinian blood in direct, genocidal language. “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant yesterday. “Finish them, Netanyahu,” said former Ambassador to the United Nations and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. “Neutraliz[e] the terrorists,” said Democratic senator John Fetterman. Jews share memes about the highest number of Jewish casualties since the Holocaust, not bothering to ask who, right now, is being ethnically cleansed, or how many massacres of this size Gaza has seen in the last dozen years. This language deploys the bombs that fall on Gazans from the sky, leveling whole neighborhoods, wiping out families without warning, huddled in their homes because they have nowhere to flee. “There are body parts scattered everywhere. There are still people missing,” one man north of Gaza City told CNN. “We’re still looking for our brothers, our children. It’s like we’re stuck living in a nightmare.” We will likely soon see this genocidal impulse spread, as the Israeli government hands out automatic weapons to West Bank settlers, many of whom were already armed eliminationists. In this way, Jewish grief is routed back into the violence of a merciless system of Palestinian subjugation that reigns from the river to the sea. It is mobilized by US politicians who support Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government, which has intensified Palestinian death and displacement and disappeared any hope of a diplomatic solution. It is marshaled to drum up support for sending weapons to Israel, even as we know that, as Haggai Mattar wrote in +972 Magazine, “there is no military solution to Israel’s problem with Gaza, nor to the resistance that naturally emerges as a response to violent apartheid.”

We can’t let our grief be bent to these purposes, but it’s not clear where else to put it. Anyone who has been working in this space knows that our movements are not prepared to manage the emotional and political fallout. We watch as Jewish people and groups we thought we had pulled into our struggle, or at least begun to move politically, suddenly close ranks, profess support for the IDF, retreat into despair. Already complex and fragile relationships between Palestinian and left-wing Jewish activists—as well as factions within both of these groups—are being challenged as we struggle to derive the same meaning from the images coming across our screens. Friends and colleagues on all sides find themselves hurt by one another’s public reactions, or by their silence. A veteran anti-Zionist activist I spoke to wondered if a “chasm” was opening up between Palestinian and Jewish activists, especially as the current moment has made visible diaspora Jews’ tangible connections to that place and those people that are, inconveniently, not just the stuff of Israeli propaganda. Over the weekend, many avowed anti-Zionist Jews found they could not join solidarity protests because they needed something the protests could not provide: a space to grieve the Israeli dead, to struggle with their own place in the coming political process. It is a situation none of us have ever before confronted in earnest, amid a long history of vastly disproportionate death tolls. And now, when we need it most, we find ourselves struggling with a lack of emotional and political vocabulary.

On October 7th, my own feelings fluctuated wildly. My first feeling was fear. To listen closely to the genocidal language of this Israeli government over the past year has been to live in terror of the day they would find the excuse to pursue it. Writing in n+1, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion recounts the words of a campus activist in the wake of 9/11: “They’re already dead,” he’d said on the day Bush declared war on Iraqis, their fates sealed. I felt these words in my body, sobbing loudly in front of the screen. There were also bursts, very early on, of awe. I watched the image of the bulldozer destroying the Gaza fence again and again and cried tears of hope. I watched Palestinian teenagers seemingly out joyriding in a place half a mile away that they’d never been; a Gazan blogger suddenly reporting from Israel. But these images were quickly joined by others—the image of a woman’s body, mostly naked and bent unnaturally in the back of a truck; rooms full of families lying in piles, the walls spattered in blood. I wanted desperately to keep these images separate—to hold close the liberatory metaphor and banish the violent reality. By the time I began to accept that these were pictures of the same event, I was distraught, and contending with a rising alienation from those who did not seem to share my grief, especially as the scope of the massacre came into view.

“I have anti-Zionist Jewish friends who are rightfully scared,” writer and reporter Hebh Jamal wrote in a recent Mondoweiss article. She observes how, despite all their sympathy for Palestinian suffering, this may be the first moment such allies are tasting the fear—and the state of mourning—that has been real for Palestinians for decades. She has also lost someone this week—a cousin, 20 years old. “I do not rejoice over death. I rejoice over the possibility to live,” she writes, and as such “I cannot condemn the militants if I believe even for a second that there might be a possibility of all of this finally coming to an end.” Hebh describes the sense of possibility that many Palestinians have felt in these events, as they have disturbed—perhaps only momentarily, it remains to be seen—the dominant paradigm in which they are condemned to die waiting for their freedom, as so many other nonviolent avenues to liberation have been punished or ignored. Her reaction appears common to so many of the Palestinians I know and trust that I must try to feel my way into it.

As I watched people online debate the models of anti-colonial struggle, raising comparisons to Algeria and North America and South Africa, I found myself returning to the foundational Jewish liberation myth: the Exodus. It was hard not to think about the moment in the Passover seder when we lessen the wine in our full cups with our pinkies as we recite the plagues. This ritual has materialized as an indispensable touchstone, insisting that to hold onto our humanity we must grieve all violence, even against the oppressor.

But I also thought of the plagues themselves, particularly the final one, the slaying of the first born—children, adults, the elderly. It seems that hiding in our liberation myth is a recognition that violence will visit the oppressor society indiscriminately. I know that I have many friends, and that Currents has many readers, who are asking themselves how they can be part of a left that seems to treat Israeli deaths as a necessary, if not desirable, part of Palestinian liberation. But what Exodus reminds us is that the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn. For people who feel like their pain is being devalued, it’s because it is; and that devaluation is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life. As the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” We are seeing the ways that Jews as the agents of apartheid will not be spared—even those of us who have devoted our lives to the work of ending it. (I am thinking of Hayim Katsman, zichrono l’vracha, killed by Hamas, an activist against the expulsion of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, and Vivian Silver, a hostage in Gaza, who is known to many of its residents as the person they meet at the Erez Crossing who advocates for and facilitates their transfers to Israeli hospitals for treatment.)

(1/2)

@Sofie @kuantancurls

@mekkaokereke

There is hope.
Here is a link to a video by a survivor of one of the massacres conducted by Hamas. Powerful speech.

https://kolektiva.social/@earthworm/111226495563054866

@hakan_geijer

I had exactly the same thought...

A friend sent me this:

Double loyalty


We, the left, are often accused of double loyalty. And on days like this I really feel it. Neither loyal nor duplicitous are the right words here, and I'll explain, but the sentiment is right.
In the Mahane Yehuda market this morning, a street musician sang "Am Yisrael Chai" (“With the People of Israel”) on a manorial scale. The market itself was empty, and a woman was talking to her friend about her regular vegetable seller who was not allowed to open today. All stalls owned by Arabs are closed. In the street around her, families get out of two vehicles. The majority are already crying, the rest hold a sadness that is hard to explain, and hesitantly knock on the door of one of the houses. Family of a dead? of a kidnapped?
You open a video of a cleaning worker who was beaten in the city center because he is Arab. "Double loyalty" is seeing both this and that with tears in your eyes. It's a moment to talk to friends who don't know their family members are dead or kidnapped and why to hope, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later talking to a friend from Gaza who all he has to say is that every night now is the scariest night of his life. He calculates his chances, and his children’s, of getting up tomorrow morning.
"Double loyalty" is letting the heart break both from one and the other. It is to hold this moment between the heartbreak and the pain and the shock over the erasure of Nir Oz, and thinking about all the people there, and the anxiety over the attack on Shajaya, and thinking about all the people there (two kibbuzim that were attacked and). It's feeling the urge to both donate blood and arrange food baskets for the south, and also to be in Susia when settlers shoot any shepherd who dares to leave the village. Loyalty may not be the right word. It's double pain, double heartbreak, care, love. It is to hold everyone's humanity. And it's hard. It's so hard to have humanity here. It's exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go. It's so much easier to "choose a side" - it almost doesn't matter which side. Just choose, and stick to it, and at least reduce the amount of pain you hold. And at least feel part of a group and less alone in all this. As if that's really an option. As if we don't understand that our pains are intertwined. That there is no solution only to the pain of Ofakim (an Israeli city in the south, overrun by Hamas) without a solution to the pain of Khan Yunis (a city in Gaza). And we know it, and recite it, and hurt it over and over again.
I tried to understand what I was actually writing, and especially why. What's the point, except to get a little out of this feeling of having two worlds that look so contradictory from the outside and feel so much the same from the inside. I think the closest I've come to an answer to why I'm writing is because somehow, in a heartbreaking and soul-crushing way, it also feels like the only optimism I can hold right now. Optimism based on the fact that it exists.
And this pain, that some of us in our small community hold, this "double loyalty", is probably the hope of this place.

#Israel #Gaza #FreePalestine #WeStandWithIsrael #FreeGaza #Palestine #Hamas

Interesting to note that this wave of new signups is much more diverse.
While in earlier waves, it was very European/NorthAmerican, this time people from many more countries are joining us.

This is absolutely great! :anarchoheart3: 🥳 :fediverso: :black_sparkling_heart:

@JessTheUnstill @platypus

The crazy thing is that most of the really rich that are wreckinh our planet are not even happy.
(Not wanting to glorify poverty, just to remark that above a certain threshold, an increase in wealth does not add to your emotional wellbeing)

To be fair, in Germany at the equivalent point in late 1920s-early 1930s, there were not yet the guns pointing at our (great-)grandparents heads (besides some SA street violence, fascists had still not seized political power).
The crazy thing is that the playbook is so surprisingly similar.
Until some months ago, I was arguing (also here on Mastodon) against labeling these people as fascists.
But 'fascists is as fascist does'.
And the playbook is so obvious. 😢
Additionally, we can observe in realtime how powerhungry politicians promote fascists-friendly discourses and, when their bases sucked in the ideas, get replaced by guys that really believe the stuff.

I hope always that in thr US it turns out like in Italy, where a fascist leader, once in charge, does only marginally more inhumane politics than their liberal-conservative counterparts (tells a lot about the so-called lesser evil parties...).

And it's always the bystanders. The media that want to be neutral and give endless hours of screentime to fascist ideas and concerns. The conservative liberals that don't want to appear leftist and maintain the system until they dug their own grave.

Be fucking aware. And organize effectively on many levels and with many different circles.
Vote if you must, but don't think that this solves anything substantial.

Take care :anarchoheart3:

@aral